Italy Roundtable – an invitation accepted

A year ago I received an email from Jessica Spiegel of Why Go Italy in which she invited me to a project that would unite a few Italy bloggers. I was very honoured to be included in her shortlist of people she considered good enough for the task. We ended up being a group of five women: 2 resident in Tuscany (Gloria and I), one in Umbria (Rebecca), one in the States (Melanie), and Jessica herself who lives in the States but travels frequently to Italy (I think). And the Italy Blogging Roundtable was born. We still haven’t actually met around a round table, but there are people out there who are convinced that we actually have monthly meetings, and sometimes it feels like we do!

Each month, starting in May 2011, we have chosen a general topic that could be applied to Italy travel, and written on this theme. After some specific things like “my favourite work of art in Italy”, when Rebecca was a little jealous of my specialty in this topic ;), we moved on to more general things like “elements” and “roots”. These topics are perhaps more challenging, and have produced the widest range of approaches.

Diana’s post about The Elements features this beautiful bowl she made.

Now it’s our one-year anniversary and I’m amazed that we’re still at it. I am so fortunate to have found a great group of girls who are not only good writers, they’re 100% reliable. It’s amazing to see how we’ve respected deadlines all year – except when Gloria had a baby, she was about 3 days late with her post… I think we’ve all grown from the exchange, as we’ve challenged each other to write the best possible article about each topic.

For our anniversary we invited other bloggers to write on any of the topics we’ve covered in the past. Here are the gifts we got from them. Thank you!

May 2011: Our first topic was Why I Write About Italy and more than one invitee agreed that this was a good question. I like both the article by Linda on “Travel the Write Way” about being inspired by her Italian origins, and the funny one by Lisa Choido at Renovating Italy who writes out of passion. Cathy from An Italophile reminisces about her first visit to Pitigliano and her love for Italy.

Nobody chose to write about the topics from June through October, Driving in Italy, My Favorite work of Art in Italy, Back to School and Autumn! The latter two are clearly too seasonal…

December 2011: Last Christmas we blogged about Gifts and other bloggers participated in that one too, but Kate, whom I recently met, took up the topic again to tell us about how she received an easter egg from an impecably dressed eight-year-old on her blog Driving like a Maniac. I had kinda hoped she’d write about driving in Italy…

February 2012: Of all the people who should write about our theme Elements, I’m glad Diana Baur did, for her ceramics make beautiful use of earth and fire, and her writing is wonderfully poetic. Thanks for your post “Elements on A Certain Simplicity.” Diana’s post could also almost fall under January’s topic which was “crafts.”

March 2012’s topic was Roots and apparently nobody else wanted to take up that challenge.

One final thing: For our birthday we also have created social channels just for our Roundtable – don’t miss a post, please follow @italyroundtable on twitter and join the Italy Roundtable facebook page!

I’m out of practice with driving at the moment, living as I do in the middle of a city. Although I suppose I could have written about your crazy GPS system in Perugia …!

http://www.arttrav.com arttrav

haha! that was fun, thanks for keeping me company!

http://www.umbriascribe.com/ Nina Hansen Machotka

Hi there! I love your blog and have wanted to join for quite awhile…but I don’t see where to join. I’ve subscribed via email as well. I live in Umbria and have a blog of my own, but I’m still coming up to speed on certain technical things. So….if you could help me out and tell me how to join (or allow me to apply), I would very much appreciate it!

Thank you!
Nina Hansen Machotka

http://www.arttrav.com arttrav

Hi Nina
Thanks for commenting, I’m so glad you’re a regular reader!
What do you mean exactly by ‘where to join’? If you mean the Roundtable, we have twice opened up a topic to other bloggers but we’re not taking ‘applications’ to join it right now. If you keep an eye on my blog or those of my blogging colleagues, next time we open up the topic you can certainly contribute!
As for subscribing to ArtTrav, where did you subscribe by email? is it through an RSS feed reader? I don’t actually have an email newsletter. You can use any RSS reader like google reader to get the RSS feed sent to you, so you hear about every post. Otherwise, if you are on facebook I always share posts there as well as other things like photos and friends’ blogs. Finally, I am on twitter where I am quite active!
What’s your blog about? Do you post nice pictures of Umbria?
alexandra

Who is ArtTrav?

Hi, I'm Alexandra Korey and my goal is to make art accessible. I'm from Toronto, Canada, but live in Florence, and I put my PhD in art history to use in arts marketing, blogging and social media.

ArtTrav, a blog about expat life, art and travel in Italy and Europe, has been online since 2004. Want to know more?